Category : Prayer

Biking around my NASA affiliated Houston neighborhood is one of my simple joys. When neighbors ask if we’re “the family that bikes to Church,” I smile with delight and gratitude. Yes. Yes, we are.

Honestly, this isn’t something that I would instinctively insert into my daily prayer. Yet, studying the Psalms has prompted me to ask at any given moment: What is my Psalm? This simple question helps integrate prayerful conversation with God into the ordinary moments of daily life.

To pray in the style of the Psalms – or to pray using the words of the Psalms themselves – it’s helpful to know a little background.

The Book of Psalms is a collection of prayers and songs from throughout Israel’s history. They are prayerful responses to real, specific life experiences. And as varied as our life experiences may be on any given day, so are the Psalms! This variety and connection to life is why the Psalms were so often sung and prayed in worship by the ancient Israelites, sung and prayed by Jesus and the apostles, and continue to be sung and prayed by us today.

Acknowledging simple joys with a Psalm of Praise is a beautiful way to recognize God’s presence in all things.

How?

Begin by inviting praise, such as: “Let us praise God!” Then articulate the specific reasons for praising God in that moment. And conclude by recapping the praise.

Look at how Psalm 117 – which is the shortest Psalm, with only two verses – provides a great example of this basic structure:

As I bike through my neighborhood, if I were to use the words from Scripture, I might recite the final verse of Psalm 150

But the beautiful gift of the Psalms is how they also teach us how to pray our own Psalm of Praise.

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For the longest time, our family dinner conversation was…painfully boring, and not for a lack of trying. We ate dinner together as a family regularly, but we have young kids who were neither contributing to the conversation nor responding to unending questions: “How was your day?” “What did you work on?” “Who did you sit with at lunch?” “What did you do in P.E.?” To be honest, my husband wasn’t a lot better: “Fine… Had a never-ending meeting for [acronym-laced-NASA-project].”

We wanted our family dinner time to be an experience of community. Sometimes fun and joyful. Sometimes serious. Often something in-between. Really, we just wanted more quality in our time together. And it just wasn’t happening.

Can you relate? When it comes to cultivating quality conversations with your loved ones, what are your successes? What are your struggles?

When I shared my frustration about what felt like a missed-opportunity with my dear friend Heidi, she shared an approach to dinner-time conversation called “The Rose.” It is prayerful, it is diverse, it is easy to do, and it enriches the whole experience of dinner-time conversation. Did I mention it’s prayerful?

Heidi learned from Sara, who learned it from a family retreat… It is so simple and so powerful that I wrote about it in Chapter 10 “Prayer as Conversation,” in my new book Continuing the Journey. And it is in this rich tradition of passing on fantastic ideas that I share it with you.